By Todd Kliman
Washington Post Sunday Magazine, November 1, 1992
Nine o'clock on a muggy Washington morning. Along New York Avenue, heading southwest into the city, they're backed up for blocks. It's been stop-and-go for the last five minutes, and the exhaust is hovering over traffic like a thick and dirty fog, making it feel even more oppressively hot than it already is. Horns are blaring every few seconds, it seems, and together with the sounds of a jackhammer from the construction site a couple blocks down, the noise is positively headache inducing.
For the commuters sitting behind their wheels sweating, this is the worst kind of rush-hour nightmare. For Alec Armbrister, it's street theater. It's made-to-order excitement. The exhaust isn't dirty and disgusting, it's atmospheric, a mood enhancer, like that smoke that comes up from under the stage in all his favorite head-banging music videos. And the horns and the jackhammers? They're the soundtrack to his morning adventure; if you watch him in action there's really no other word for it, although the last thing a road-weary commuter sitting behind his wheel and sweating is going to appreciate, the last thing he wants to see, is some bike messenger on a banana-colored Nishiki Manitoba weaving playfully in and out of the chain of cars, as if to mock every last one of them because he can move and they can't.
Look at him -- he's smiling! It's one of those broad, ever-ready smiles that, coupled with his close-cropped, surfer-blond hair and untroubled blue eyes, leads you at first to assume he's a purebred Californian, though it probably has more to do with the fact he's never held anything remotely approaching a desk job in his life. He's actually smiling in the midst of this rush-hour madness! And the commuters, and the cabdrivers, who don't much like couriers to begin with, who are sitting by idly and sweating, they're all glaring at him, and it's not hard to know what they're thinking: another one. Another one of them. No regard for the rules of the road. No respect. Just like the others, descending on traffic at the worst times of the day like a swarm of insects. If only they stood still long enough to be swatted . . .
But Armbrister just keeps smiling. And why not? To a boy dispatched by his mother on an errand, after all, it's the mischief along the way that counts -- how much he can get himself into, and out of -- far more than the thing itself for which he was sent.
The thing itself, in this case, happens to be a key document from the law firm of Silverstein and Mullens at 1776 K St. NW, and the dispatcher happens to be R&S Couriers of Bethesda, the company that employs Armbrister as one of its 15 independent contractors. And the errand just happens to be one of those very important transactions that occur every day in the most important city in the most important country in the world. But does that mean it's got to be carried out with the sobriety of a secret mission? Not to Armbrister's way of thinking, it doesn't. If it did, then he'd have probably given this up long ago. Couriering -- or "currying," as he calls it, typically slurring his words, as if his mind, and not just his arms and legs, were trained to think ahead to the next destination -- is all he's ever done. It's all he's ever wanted to do, really. He's 28 years old. Not that he particularly likes making deliveries.
Actually, making deliveries is the least of it. Every morning he gets to throw on a ratty pair of Reeboks, a torn pair of gray shorts, a ripped blue "Jodie Foster's Army" T-shirt, and get out on his bike, free of supervision, free of any demands or expectations except his own, and spend the day, in his words, "playing in traffic."
ALONG NEW YORK AVENUE, THE CONGESTION is easing now. Cars are moving more freely. And with just the tiniest of openings, Armbrister makes a quick move and shoots in front of the pack. He's zipping through traffic lights and stop signs, riding happily, without incident, when out of the corner of his eye he sees a Metrobus barreling down 14th Street, approaching the intersection at New York where he is about to make a left turn.
All of a sudden his shoulders hunch for- ward and his eyes narrow, like a linebacker smoking out a sack. But he doesn't flinch. Or blink.
In fact, he speeds up.
He speeds up, lifting off the Manitoba Nishiki for more leverage, his legs doing double time on the pedals. He wants this -- excitement, confrontation, it's what he lives for. He doesn't even think twice about what might very well happen. Why should he? It's just a Metrobus, after all. And, to Armbrister, as a courier, what you can see can't hurt you. It's what you can't see that you have to worry about -- an unexpected swing of a car door, for example. Like the time two years ago, hurtling down K Street in rush-hour traffic, he got upended by a car door and went flying 20 feet in the air.
But this is different, a chance to have some fun. All those hours of making runs across town, picking up documents for lobbyists, delivering documents to other lobbyists, riding elevators all over the city, enduring summer's heat and humidity -- a moment like this is worth all of that put together. There's no one to watch over him -- no boss, no supervisor telling him what to do, what not to do. He can do whatever he wants. Who can stop him? Right now, it's not a job, even. It's adventure. Freedom. Possibility. Just him, and his bike, and the city as his playground.
Huck Finn on wheels.
He makes a wedge of his body, and then makes his move. He's immersed in his performance. The muscles in his neck and arms and calves are straining. The sweat is running down his body. He slices between a taxi and a Honda and emerges from the pack of traffic, face to face, mano a mano, with the Metrobus itself.
You are slow and sluggish and big and ungraceful, he seems to say. I am quick and lyrical and free. He draws within 15 feet of the bus and raises his arm high for all to see, a gesture meant to freeze the bus in the middle of traffic. It works. He goes flying across the intersection, swerving onto 14th Street, grinning like any kid who's just gotten away with something.
He locks up the bike against a parking sign, takes the document out of his backpack, pushes through the double glass doors.
The delivery itself seems almost anticlimactic.
PLAYING CHICKEN WITH A BUS, RISKING LIFE AND limb, creating a potential accident at a major intersection -- all in the name of delivering a parcel? Is he crazy?
Well, yes and no. Aren't they all crazy? Couriers? Collectively, the reputation isn't exactly the sort you'd call solid or upstanding: They blatantly disregard stop signs, stoplights and general laws of traffic; they run over squirrels to make a delivery; barrel down sidewalks at top speeds and strike fear in the hearts of unsuspecting pedestrians (who frequently find themselves doubling as human pylons); and by and large treat the city as if it were a giant obstacle course for their crazed pursuits. And that's just on the streets. Inside the corridors of the city's offices, they're notorious for their deskside manner, which, depending on whom you ask, is rude or arrogant, or often both. That's the stereotype, anyway. As with most stereotypes, there's more than a kernel of truth to it.
You'd like Armbrister, though. At least off his bike you'd like him. He's so easygoing and sweet-natured, it'd be hard not to. Remember the guy in high school everyone got along with? The one the girls all wanted to date, and the guys all wanted to be like? That's Armbrister. Somehow, he makes you want to like him. Hey, how ya doin'? All right, man! In conversation, over pizza and spring water at Vesuvios at Dupont Circle, he comes across as conscientious, sensitive -- gracious, even. He takes great pains to prove he's not one of those couriers. He'll tell you how important it is that all parcels are handled promptly and professionally, that a client is fully satisfied and that a good, courteous impression is made -- all that. He'll tell you how much it bothers him that couriers are held in such low regard throughout the city -- that it's a shame the majority of hard workers should be undercut by a handful of irresponsible screw-ups. He'll tell you how proud he is that, in a business where many messengers last only a year or two, and the ones who do last often hop from company to company, he's been with R&S from the very start, seven years now. He'll tell you how much it means to him that, among the roughly 400 people in the city who do what he does, he's established himself as one of the best, typically taking home between $400 and $700 a week for handling about 30 deliveries a day, paid according to the distance and time required.
He'll tell you all about the arduous preparation he puts into this. Rising early each morning for his ritual start-up: a little bit of stretching, followed by a workout of sit-ups and push-ups to get his body loose for the day ahead -- performed to the strains of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," which, he'll be sure to mention, he politely keeps to a decibel level that is merely thundering, in deference to his next-door neighbor, the Rev. Price. Exercise is immediately followed by two cups of coffee. Then into the purposely ragged gloves he wears on his hands -- the fingers cut off to give him better friction on his handlebars -- and into the spiked dog collar, which Armbrister says puts him in the mood for work. Finally, to get his mind going, to get himself psyched as he bolts from the top floor of his Mount Pleasant group house, a little bit of humming -- the jingle from the Gatorade commercial, "If I Could Be Like Mike," invoking his idol, Michael Jordan.
"I like to think of myself," he'll tell you, "as the Michael Jordan of couriers."
IT'S ALL VERY WINNING, THIS EARNESTNESS OF HIS -- maybe a little too winning.
Think of a schoolboy with a troublemaker's reputation being called into conference, trying his darnedest to convince his teacher and parents of his study habits, when everyone knows as soon as he leaves their sight he'll be getting into something.
Think of Eddie Haskell in front of Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver.
Take away Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver, of course, and what you have is the real Eddie Haskell -- Eddie unleashed, grinning, mischief-making, devil-may-care.
Armbrister takes a final swig of spring water and lunch is over. He's halfway out the door when a crackle comes over his two-way radio:
"R&S base to Unit 100!"
It's as if lightning has just struck nearby. Armbrister begins bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. His eyes contract into these intent little slits, and a kind of fierceness seems to come over him, as if he were subconsciously preparing himself for battle.
"Hundredman, go!" he shouts.
It comes out: Hunterman.
It's a conscious slurring. Simply by eliding a couple of letters, he's turned a simple "handle" into, not just a nickname, but something greater still. He's made himself over into every school kid's fantasy -- a comic book hero.
Hunterman! Stalking through the city! Tracking down packages! Making rush deliveries in half an hour!
"Hunterman off!" he says to himself, as he boards his bike and pushes into the street.
When he was little, he dreamed of being an astronaut, and whenever people would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up -- which they inevitably did, given the sort of circles in which his writer-father Trevor Armbrister traveled -- that's what he'd tell them, and they would smile at him indulgently.
Now, whenever he's with his father's friends -- or any other so-called "real" adults, as he calls them -- and he happens to bring up what he does, he just gets these looks. Oh. Well.
He's almost 30, after all. It's not so cute anymore, playing at life.
"All these expectations people have," he says. "All these notions."
Everything has changed, he says. Everything is different. He hasn't changed, that's for sure. He's not different. He's still the same old Alec Armbrister. And all that he ever imagined being an astronaut was like, being a courier is really the same sort of thing, isn't it? Not the part about years and years of study and preparation needed just to be able to be sent into orbit. He never really thought about that part. But the part about floating around in space all day, blasting off to faraway galaxies, the boyish fantasy part -- that part he thought about and that part he finds on his bike.
"I just can't describe the feeling I get from it, the high," he says. "It's a high, it is, it's like: You get on that bike, and you start going, and there's nobody else, nobody else but you and your bike, and you got the whole city in front of you, and anything can happen, that's the really great thing about it. Anything can happen."
He wishes his father would understand, because he really thinks all the cool, crazy stuff he does -- the way he thinks up all those maneuvers to break through rush-hour gridlock -- he somehow owes to him, to his father's creativity. Really. He wishes his father would see that.
It's not easy between them, to say the least -- although they have made progress over the years, enough that Trevor Armbrister can now say of his son, "Whatever makes him happy," even if he does throw in: "It wouldn't make me happy."
In the past, "whenever people would ask me what my son did, I'd always say, 'He's a messenger -- and he's a musician.' I don't do that anymore," says Trevor, 58, a senior editor at Reader's Digest and the author of several books, among them President Ford's memoirs, A Time to Heal, and A Matter of Accountability: The True Story of the Pueblo Affair. Now, he says, he's come to a kind of acceptance of his son's way of earning a living. "He's not going to set the fields on fire in medicine or law or journalism. He hears his own message."
He's eager to add, "I'm extraordinarily proud of him."
Nevertheless, the philosophical battle between the two of them rages, quietly.
It's just that, well, Trevor Armbrister would like Alec to find something -- he won't push -- a little more stable, steady, with a benefits package perhaps, and some insurance for the future. He can't ride around on a bike forever.
Responsibility. It comes up in their talks all the time. Growing up, settling down.
Trevor: The fax is spreading throughout this industry like a cancer, putting couriers out of business. And look, one wild turn by a cabdriver could spell the end of everything -- not just your job, but your life . . .
Alec: Yeah, Dad, you've got some good points, I'll think about it.
Trevor: The handwriting's clear on the wall.
Alec: Dad.
Just the other night, Trevor tried to pass along a phone number, a contact for a "steady job."
Alec, as usual, politely but firmly declined. "Gee, thanks, Dad. No."
Lately they talk a lot about school.
"You really should think about going back," Trevor told Alec. School could help to lay a foundation for the future, a steppingstone toward something substantial.
School? Alec thinks. Him? All that structure, all those rules? One of the happiest days of his life was graduating from Bethesda-Chevy Chase and leaving immediately for California, because California seemed to him to be nothing so much as complete freedom.
It was on "a whim pretty much" that he hitchhiked around Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo, and finally turned up, broke and free, in San Francisco. He couldn't get a job, so he bought a secondhand set of congas and started playing for money at Fisherman's Wharf. Sometimes he made enough money that after a couple of days, he could get a motel room. Usually he just slept in any back yard he could find. He did this for about six months. In Berkeley, he met a guy named Mack who, he says, taught him "more about life" than 12 years of school ever did. Through sheer force of personality, or maybe it was just guile, Mack every month inveigled a sizable disability check, though he was fully capable of working, and the two of them roomed together for several months -- "smoked a lot of weed, hung out: lived life," as Armbrister says.
When he returned home, he knew it was time to face the real world, but he also knew he didn't want to be tied down all day, to be subjected to structure. And so, when along came the chance to be a courier -- Scott Foreman, the owner of R&S, had been a friend of his family's, his mother had dropped a few hints, a few strings were pulled -- Armbrister jumped. He realized almost instantly, he says, that he'd found his calling.
THREE O'CLOCK, DUPONT CIRCLE Park -- "the Loop," as the couriers call it. It's their unofficial home base, a place to confer and shoot the breeze, and as Armbrister pedals in, the sweat pouring off him, two or three dozen bikers are already gathered in their usual state of blissed-out defiance. Resting, taking a break, some drinking beers from paper bags, some smoking cigarettes. Bikes are everywhere, strewn around the grass and sidewalk like a child's toys around the living room at playtime.
"Hey, Al."
"Hey, man, how you doin'?"
"I'm cool, I'm cool, how you doin'?"
"Doin' all right. Twenty-one deliveries, man. I'm hittin'."
In this playground atmosphere, all braggadocio and extended teasing, Armbrister is clearly in his element playing the popular, preening athlete on the courts at recess. Everyone likes him, and he likes everyone. It's adolescence all over again.
"That's Scrooge over there," says Armbrister, as if this were the first day of the school year. "Hey, Scrooge, man. How you doin'? All right!"
More couriers come streaming in. Armbrister seems to know them all.
"There's Bill," he says, pointing. "Hey, Bill, what's up? How you doin'?"
It's a tightknit, insular world, the world of the Loop. Outsiders are looked at suspiciously. Buttons and bumper-sticker philosophies abound, often with obscene references to authority figures. A few years ago, the infamous "Meese Is a Pig" T-shirts -- the product of one courier's fancy -- were all over the place. The conversations are rife with sneering talk of "suits" (professionals in pin stripes) and "rookies" (young college kids who come in for the summer and try their hand at couriering). At times, the alienation is so thick you could cut it with a bicycle chain.
At other times, sometimes at the very same time, the Loop is one big party. Anything goes. Just look around. Just look at the hair. There are tangled masses of hair, purple hair, pink hair, braided hair, dreadlocked hair, or else no hair at all. Or look at the clothes. Ripped clothes, found clothes, borrowed clothes, infrequently washed clothes, clothes that make a political statement. Anything goes. Because the whole idea of the Loop is: everyone expressing himself, herself. Everyone just being. One courier has called it "Woodstock II." Another courier, trying to put his finger on it, has gone so far as to call the whole scene here a coming together of "all the sons and daughters who never went to college." Which is not exactly true, this last remark. A fair number of couriers have gone to college -- in fact, a friend of Alec's, a courier, is a graduate of MIT -- though a fair number of them have also dropped out. The point is, no one talks much about matters of status.
It's all very egalitarian here. Everyone supports everyone else, whatever the situation. A bit like a family, but without that sense of obligation and responsibility that families traditionally try to impose on their members. No one here tries to burden anyone else with pressures or expectations. Or with incessant talk of the future. Nothing like that.
"It's home," Armbrister says. "You can be yourself here, whatever you want."
If things are going badly, Armbrister says, he knows he can always come into the Loop. All he could ever want or need, he can find right here, right now. A beer, a smoke. A couple of dollars on loan from another biker when money's short. Someone to complain with. What more could anyone ask for? What more could anyone want from life?
"Everyone looks out for each other here," he says. "We take care of each other."
He looks across the park and spots his good friend, Mike Latterell of Falcon Express, pulling his little no-frills blue bike into the Loop.
"Mike, man," he calls out, "how you doin'?"
He waves for Latterell to come over.
"Talk about crazy," he says, laughing, "this guy's crazy."
By all rights, Latterell shouldn't even be on his feet right now, much less zipping around town on a bike. A week and a half ago, he was flying down Massachusetts Avenue, doing about 30, when a cab came to a dead stop to collect a fare. The next thing Latterell knew, he was sailing headfirst through the back window.
He spent a day in the hospital, then asked to be released. He told them he was fine.
The truth is, he's got no insurance. Like many couriers, he's an independent contractor, so he's got to pay his own bills. Which means he's got to keep on riding, despite the pains.
For Armbrister's benefit, or maybe just for effect, he pulls up his secondhand Notre Dame T-shirt to reveal the extent of his injuries.
"Damn, man, look at you," says Armbrister, incredulous. He leans forward for a better look.
Latterell's entire right side is bruised and scarred and looks like a multicolored Rorschach test. Along with his skull-and-crossbones tattoo there are now deep, red gashes all over his arms too. And his neck. And his cheeks. He's 22, but you wouldn't know it -- he looks much, much older.
"Hey, Al."
Armbrister hears the voice and turns around. "Hey, Cali, man, what's up? How you doin', man?"
He's spoken without thinking, because behind him here comes Cali limping badly along the row of benches in the park -- the result of a run-in with a motorist a couple of weeks ago. Like Latterell, he's got no insurance. And like Latterell, he's still riding.
Armbrister just looks at him. Then back at Latterell. He doesn't say anything.
This little parade of the walking wounded has suddenly stilled him -- which, given his usual glibness, is all the more remarkable. It's as if, watching them as they hobble around gritting their teeth, he were projecting himself into their place, the way middle-aged people do when they visit retirement homes.
He knows he could be one of them. He knows he could get out there on his bike right now, and in a matter of minutes be upended by some car door, just like them. And that would be that.
He knows it, he sees it.
But when the two-way crackles again a moment later with news of another delivery, a drop at Video Monitoring Service on 14th Street, not even one of those long runs that's going to bring in a lot of money, Armbrister hops on his bike and, in a flash, he's out of the Loop and into the street, as if he can't leave fast enough.
FIVE O'CLOCK, DEEP IN THE HEART OF the K Street corridor. "Crazy hour," Armbrister calls it. The law firms are finishing up last-minute business for the day, and the two-way radio is sending him somewhere every few minutes, it seems. His manifest is rapidly filling up. He's headed for a 30-plus-delivery day, which is about as good as you can expect.
"Just the way I like it," Armbrister says. "The adrenaline's pumping, and you're flying all over the city, going here, going there, and you're just so into it, and after a while you just hit this zone, you know? And when you're in that zone, you can do anything. It's almost like you're invincible. Nothing can touch you. It's incredible.
"And that's what you want, that's what you live for: You want to be constantly busy and running around so that you can get into your zone. You don't like to have too much time to be thinking."
It's that way for him off the bike too.
"Life is simple," he says. "People keep trying to make it all complicated."
As he says, couriering isn't just a job, it's a freewheeling way of life. Thinking too much only interferes with things.
His father worries, other people worry. "The handwriting's clear on the wall." He knows it, he sees it. How could you not see it? But why worry constantly about it?
So the fax is putting a hurt on the courier industry -- business is down, by nearly all estimates, by approximately 20 percent, and expected to fall even further over the next couple of years, especially now that government is rapidly becoming more automated. So the forecast is bleak -- as Joe Ganum of Choice, the city's largest courier company, says, we may well see a bicycle messenger-less city -- or at the least a city in which bicycle messengers exist in only a token capacity, reduced to perhaps a tenth of their current strength. So it's already happened in Manhattan, where there are virtually no more bicycle messengers, just a lot of walkers who skillfully negotiate an efficient and extensive subway system.
So?
So he's not getting any younger either. He comes home at night now, he's got to soak his body for a good 30 minutes before he can feel loose and easy again, he's that sore. He's been in this business a long time. So, after all that, there's nothing really to fall back on, should a car door catch him the wrong way -- no insurance, no college education, and nothing squirreled away for the future.
So? he seems to say, gliding down Connecticut Avenue now, with his hands behind his head and his legs doing all the work, savoring the moment of his last delivery of the day -- his 32nd, a drop at HQ International Square.
Why worry? he seems to say.
All he needs is the present, the great uncomplicated, untroubled Right Now.
Let everyone else pay the insurance premiums and mortgages and loans. Let everyone else punch 9-to-5 and push papers and plan for their lives.
In a little while he'll be back in the Loop again, among friends, drinking a beer, and everything will be all right.
His eyes are blue and bright and unconcerned. He's riding his bike and he's loving life.
What could be better than this, right here, right now? he seems to say.
Suddenly his eyes narrow. Up ahead, to the left, a Metrobus is coming down Rhode Island Avenue, ready to intersect Connecticut. Oh, sure, the day's work is done, at least as far as R&S is concerned -- there are no more parcels to pick up, no more parcels to drop off, but what's he got to do that's better than this, right here, right now?
He speeds up, leans forward . . .
Todd Kliman is a freelance writer whose previous Magazine article was on punk rock in Washington.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at messvilleto@yahoo.com